Category: South Africa

Employees who were not entitled to maternity leave before will now on be entitled to 10 days’ paid parental leave to be paid out of the Unemployment Insurance Fund.

This follows the signing of the Labour Laws Amendment Bill into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Friday.

In terms of the act an employee who is a parent not covered by maternity leave will be entitled to 10 consecutive days’ parental leave when their child is born or when an adoption order is granted.

It also enables the adoptive parents of a child of under two years old to take adoption leave of two months and two weeks consecutively.

If there are two adoptive parents‚ one of them is entitled to adoption leave and the other employee is entitled to parental leave of 10 days.
The same provision is made for commissioning parents in a surrogate motherhood agreement.

Surrogacy – a word recently dragged kicking and screaming into the limelight by the pop-couple Kardashian-West. What caused the outcry? Kim’s decision: the mother of two would not bear their third child herself. Worldwide the topic of surrogacy sparks debate. Leaving ethics aside for a moment, should the legal aspects of surrogacy be influenced by social, political or geographical factors?

Surrogacy is not a concept or practice foreign to South Africa. The Children’s Act of 2005 prescribes that all surrogacy arrangements are to be governed by a “surrogacy motherhood agreement” (SMA), the validity of which must be confirmed by a court. A recent decision handed down by the Johannesburg High Court highlighted a few requirements for such confirmation. The judgment arguably opens the door to social, political and or geographical discrimination.